Christopher Hitchens Quotes, Thoughts and Images

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

It's called faith because it's not knowledge.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.

I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.